Who’s having enjoyable on the Vuelta’s Big Comfy Sofa this 12 months?

Cycling is a sport that centres round sitting. On the bike, you sit. On the group bus, you sit. What different sport is as sitting-focused as that?! Motorbikes and automobiles, certain, however past that – do you see rivals sitting round in soccer – American, British, Australian? Or tennis? No, biking is in rarefied air as one of many few sports activities contested with substantial arse involvement. 

Even so, the seats are normally incidental relatively than the entire level. So when a cycling-adjacent seat achieves cut-through into the general public consciousness, it’s form of an enormous deal. The silly-small couch at Milan-San Remo? A notable chair. The dorky gaming chairs they use at sizzling seats on time-trial days? Notable chairs. And the Vuelta’s Big Comfy Sofa? That proper there, my pals, is a notable chair. 

As we learnt final 12 months, the Vuelta Big Comfy Sofa is an inconceivable advertising and marketing promotion for a series of state-owned luxurious motels known as Paradores. I wouldn’t anticipate you to know this, as a result of I don’t assume anybody is a bunch of cyclists melting into a settee and going “hmm yes, this primes me to book a four-night getaway in Cardona”, and in the event that they had been, I don’t assume they’d get to that time by wanting on the Paradores logos on the sofa cushions, seeing as they’re, by design, obscured by as much as eight skilled cyclists. 

I digress. For the second consecutive 12 months, the Vuelta couch is there, and boys are gonna be sitting. And in that reality, we will be taught one thing deeper about them: about group dynamics, about riders’ disposition to levity, about how tense or mellow everyone seems to be from daily, and so forth. A few weeks into the Vuelta, now we have sufficient to attract some agency conclusions about them as individuals.

Or one thing.

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